Michael Buerk enters the fray on the climate debate showing just how conservative and ill-informed you have to be to make it as a newsreader. My two cents worth is :

It's a bit rich for a BBC newsreader to spout "I don’t want the media to make up my mind up for me." Where does Buerk get "... the issues beyond doubt and the steps to be taken beyond dispute" from ? Mr Buerk posits that there probably are answers to all his quibbles and if he researched properly he would find that is so. On the whole Buerk is ruminating on tedious canards.

One statement in particular indicates that Buerk's polemic is biased towards misinforming the public "I would like to hear a clash of informed opinion about what would actually be better if it got warmer as well as worse." The trouble with that is whilst it would get better for a small few , the aggregate effect on humanity would be negative. There is no informed opinion that disputes that ergo Mr Buerk's desire to hear such a clash of opinions is on the face of it misleading.

Once again Andrew Montford brilliantly demonstrates why his narrative cannot be trusted . Montford scrambles a post by contrarian activist (and WGII author) Richard Tol over the IPCC nexus with national FOI laws. Tol isn't actually reporting anything new, but Montford headlines it "IPCC declares itself above the law" and thus another contrarian canard is born. It is however easily debunked. If the IPCC declares something there must by definition be a declaration. However Monty ignores requests to point us to the IPCC declaration he refers to. Come on now Monty, you're making it up as you go along.

Despite never being elected to public office Ivor Ichikowitz boasts that he is part of the inner circle of the President of South Africa. Indeed he flew the President to both Azerbaijan and the U.S. in his private Boeing 727 piloted by a mercenary. So what did they talk about on their travels? We can only guess but it wasn't world peace since Ichikowitz is an arms dealer and he's also known as 'a peddler of influence' .

Unlike most arms dealers Ichikowitz does give a fuck about what you think about him because he hired Bell Pottinger here in the UK to give his reputation a whitewash, that's the mob who've been caught red handed rewriting wikipedia entries on behalf of their corporate clients (not to mention pitching for the child labour business of the Uzbeki Cotton Industry).

Ichikowitz: Not just an arms dealer and warmonger but a sock puppeteer too

Last week blogger Tim Ireland exposed a number of fake wikipedia accounts run from computers registered to the disgraced PR firm. One of those 'Biggleswiki' contributed to the now deleted WP entries for Ichikowitz and his company Paramount Group.

So on the one hand Ichikowitz pays professionals to astroturf his public profile, cravenly removing any criticism from his wikipedia entry. And on the other hand he's schmoozing with politicians at the very top of the decision making process to sell his weapons to kill people. Ivor Ichikowitz is playing both ends against the middle.

Mankind is yet to invent a more inefficient method of making collective decisions than warfare. And because of people like Ivor Ichikowitz we can see why warfare is still so widely used.